Only the YouTube overlords know how much time I have spent watching videos of Japanese game shows when I should have been writing papers or studying. This should come as no surprise to anyone, because I, like many other Americans, have fallen under the whimsical Day-Glo, candy-coated spell of Japanese pop culture. Unfortunately, so has ABC.
In the tried and true tradition of lazy television executives grasping at straws for summer programming, ABC has started airing two new reality/game shows that blatantly borrow from Japanese game shows ““ the “MXC”-imitating “Wipeout” and the thoroughly bizarre “I Survived a Japanese Game Show.”
Clearly, ABC has some underpaid leet haxxor in a darkened room combing the depths of YouTube for whatever is most popular. Since Japanese game show clips have abnormally high view counts, it is only logical that the networks made like Great Britain during the scramble for Africa and tried to get a piece of the pie by riding the Japanese game show wave.
And, as usual, whenever the big networks try to hurriedly pillage a newly popular format or genre, the results are a mixed bag. This is partially due to hurried production, but also I think due to misunderstanding and mistranslating Japanese culture.
I believe that Japan is one of, if not the most, fetishized countries in the world. If you don’t believe me, just go to Comic-Con. It seems as though Americans think Japan is a nation filled with two types of people: stony-faced traditionalists whose greatest fear is “great dishonor” and human caricatures who speak only in sentences that end with exclamation points.
We also apparently believe that their culture of “great dishonor” also includes painful humiliation, because that’s all that “Wipeout” really has going for it.
“Wipeout” on ABC seems to be an Americanized version of the ’80s Japanese game show “Takeshi’s Castle.”
“Takeshi’s Castle” was famously reincarnated on the benevolent Spike TV network as “Most Extreme Elimination Challenge,” also known as “MXC,” which took the original footage, overdubbed the dialogue and filled it with more double entendres than you could shake an ahi at.
“Wipeout” is essentially a huge obstacle course, specifically designed to create spectacular face-plants. Where “Takeshi’s Castle” felt like watching a dream you might have after eating nachos before going to bed, “Wipeout” just feels hollow and mean-spirited.
While no one denies that the mini-games in “Takeshi’s Castle” were undoubtedly fiendish in their capacity for causing severe cranial damage, the original Japanese show had a sense of whimsy and ebullient energy that is notably absent from “Wipeout.” Nearly every contestant on “Takeshi’s Castle” runs up to the starting line, yells out a battle cry and then pumps a fist in the air before trying to over-zealously navigate a swinging rope.
“Takeshi’s Castle’s” sets looked like a bizarre video game, but “Wipeout’s” set looks like an overgrown erector set, all cold metal and mats.
Perhaps the reason why so much of this part of Japanese culture is lost in translation is because of our perceptions.
In an Associated Press article, Matt Hurwitz writes that Japanese game shows are sometimes almost sadistically focused on humiliation, and this characteristic will be the main ratings hurdle for these tribute shows on ABC. He goes on to state that in American game shows, we tend to laugh with the contestant, not at them. However, this viewpoint is skewed.
To call Japanese game shows practically sadistic is a severe overstatement. Since when has slapstick been sadistic? As a culture, we’ve been laughing at people hurting themselves since vaudeville. OK, in those contexts, the pain is understood to be fake. Still, the thrills and spills that take place on Japanese game shows are more in the pursuit of wackiness and slapstick than in the spirit of humiliation or sadism.
Secondly, we laugh at people all the time on American TV. The notion that stateside game shows are some sort of uplifting moment where everyone is laughing with the contestant is purely ridiculous. If anything, we’re more about humiliation and sadism than the Japanese. Look at “The X Effect” on MTV, where couples are routinely broken up and tears routinely spilled, or “The Moment of Truth,” where people are forced to admit to embarrassing truths, or “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” where roofs collapse on a fairly regular basis. We laugh at people on TV all the time.
I’ll admit it ““ I do laugh at and enjoy Japanese game shows for their spectacular falls. But I’d rather watch someone endure a brief moment of pain than watch the extended mental and emotional anguish of American game and reality shows.
I think the problem is that we see what we want to see. If TV execs want to see humiliation in Japanese game shows instead of wacky slapstick, then that’s what we’re going to get, and that’s what “Wipeout” is.
If you want to know what happened on the most recent episode of “Wipeout,” e-mail Ayres at jayres@media.ucla.edu.